Time to terminate the nuclear triad

By Daniel Wirls

October 27, 2016

Photo: American Experience Films/PBS, TNS

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The documentary film "Command and Control" focuses on a Sept. 18, 1980, accident at a Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Ark., that came terrifyingly close to causing a nuclear explosion that would have devastated the entire East Coast. (American Experience Films/PBS) less

The documentary film "Command and Control" focuses on a Sept. 18, 1980, accident at a Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Ark., that came terrifyingly close to causing a nuclear explosion that would have ... more

Photo: American Experience Films/PBS, TNS

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The crew of the Ohio opens the outer missile hatches during a final test before returning to its home base in Washington state.

The crew of the Ohio opens the outer missile hatches during a final test before returning to its home base in Washington state.

Photo: GILBERT W. ARIAS

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ONE CAPTION FOR ALL THREE PHOTOS IN PRINT EDITION FILE-- Making short work of the 12,400 foot-long runway at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Mo., a B-2 stealth bomber roars overhead Wednesday, June 26, 1996. A half-dozen B-2 stealth bombers will become part of the Pentagon's nuclear war plan as of Tuesday, April 1, 1997, according to a senior military official. The delta-shaped aircraft is unique in its design and construction to help avoid radar detection. (AP Photo/Cliff Schiappa) less

ONE CAPTION FOR ALL THREE PHOTOS IN PRINT EDITION FILE-- Making short work of the 12,400 foot-long runway at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Mo., a B-2 stealth bomber roars overhead Wednesday, June ... more

Photo: CLIFF SCHIAPPA, Associated Press

Time to terminate the nuclear triad

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With the United States embarking on an enormously expensive top-to-bottom reconstitution of its nuclear arsenal, the moment has arrived to end a nearly 60-year national commitment to the nuclear triad by eliminating all land-based missiles. The U.S. would be better off strategically and financially without the triad, and this historic unilateral action would demonstrate to the world an unequivocal commitment to peace and security.

Since its first nuclear missile submarine entered service in late 1959, the U.S. has deployed its strategic nuclear weapons on three delivery systems: bombers, land-based missiles and missiles on submarines, the so-called triad. The commitment to the triad quickly attained theological standing as inviolable doctrine, more a Nuclear Trinity than a triad. Nuclear overkill was the inevitable consequence as each leg deployed hundreds of bombs or warheads.

The necessity of a triad was doubtful even at the height of the Cold War and clearly unnecessary thereafter. Nuclear weapons are irrelevant in fights against non-state insurgencies such as the Islamic State, and a new triad will not help with whatever difficulties Russia and China might pose.

Which leg of the triad should be eliminated can be debated. Many factors point to the land-based missiles, the rebuilding of which will require layers of extra spending, including a new command and control network.

The replacement missile is estimated to cost at least $85 billion. Plans for all three legs total a minimum $350 billion over 10 years and perhaps $1 trillion over 30 years. As a result, such a decision is essential to controlling U.S. military spending, which is still near 40 percent of the world’s total and equal to the next seven countries combined, including China and Russia.

Across the decades, any and all attempts to restrain Pentagon budgets by management reforms or by reducing the total number of each type of weapon we buy have always failed.

With the Pentagon pushing to rebuild all three legs, it is inevitable that early cost estimates will balloon, as they always have. Trimming the number of weapons procured for each leg will save nothing. Only the elimination of an entire class of nuclear delivery systems has the potential to produce both real savings and transmit a powerful global message.

Proponents of the triad counter with well-worn arguments about strategic stability and emerging threats, based on far-fetched worst-case scenarios.

They argue that elimination of land-based missiles would mean fewer targets for a nuclear-capable opponent. The reduced number of targets might tempt a nuclear power in a crisis to roll the dice by attacking our bombers and whatever submarines are not deployed, betting that whatever command authority remains in the U.S. would not retaliate with the remaining weapons.

These are of course the same implausible arguments that sustained nuclear excess during the Cold War.

A nuclear dyad of bombers and submarines would still contain hundreds of strategic weapons poised to destroy any adversary. Strategic stability, as even nuclear hawks acknowledge, is as much or more a matter of psychology than hardware.

The United States has a rich history of undermining its own justifiably confident position of strategic superiority, as with the self-inflicted wounds during the MX missile debates in the early 1980s. Nuclear hawks have resurrected the same arguments and will inflict the same wounds to protect their plans for unaffordable nuclear excess. Terminating the triad would be, by contrast, a resounding statement of confidence in our strategic position and technological preeminence.

The U.S. cannot afford to develop every possible military technology and build every possible weapon. And nuclear weapons are relics compared with the panoply of digital and robotic wonders on which the Pentagon is spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

Future presidents could be fully confident, with the world’s most potent and secure submarine and bomber fleets, that no adversary would contemplate nuclear brinksmanship beyond the antics of North Korea. And of course the recent actions by that nation only highlight that the triad has not deterred such behavior.

Given the particularly impoverished debates about national security during the presidential campaign, this kind of proposal is essential for the American public to consider, and it has been endorsed by, among others, former Secretary of Defense William Perry.

The U.S. is heading down an immensely expensive and dangerous path of nuclear excess, mostly just because. Because nuclear policy is on autopilot. Because it has had a nuclear triad for more than half a century. Because all the forces with a material interest in its perpetuation are paying attention. Because nearly everyone else is not.

The next president and Congress must take nuclear policy off autopilot before the current path becomes irreversible.

Daniel Wirls is professor of politics at UC Santa Cruz. He serves on the board of the Council for a Livable World and is the author of “Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense From Reagan to Obama.”